The idea of best practices in online courses

[downer]

I've taken a couple of certificate courses in online teaching, and I have about 10 years experience doing it.

Occasionally I get my online courses assessed by someone who sees whether it meets standards. I always get some fault for why my courses don't meet standards. I make some changes but then they find something different the next time.

Curiously, they keep paying me to teach online. I get the impression this process could go on for decades, if I live that long.

I can't say I'm very motivated to meet their standards because I tend to think they are bullshit -- some mixture of truisms, overgeneralizations and arbitrary rules. I do think it is a good idea to assess what works in courses and try new things. But I'm skeptical about universal prescriptions about how to teach online, as I am about teaching in the classroom. I also think it's bullshit because they don't provide the support for faculty to actually try innovative approaches to online teaching. It seems mostly lipservice to an ideal.

So I wonder to what extent "best practices" are evidence based vs being something that someone thought was a good idea, and other people copied.

Harvard has a page here: https://teachremotely.harvard.edu/best-practices
There's a page from Stanford: https://tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/1091
And Wabash: https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/resource/videos/best-practices-in-online-teaching/

[dismalist]

Downer, I know this comment belongs in another thread, but what in hell is "best practices" supposed to mean?

Does anyone sincerely believe that we use worst practices?

That we use merely adequate practices? [I'm for this one.]

If you can collect the certificates without extra work, do so. If not, just get an adequate number of certificates. :-)

[AvidReader]

I also have been teaching online courses for about a decade, and hybrid courses intermittently in the past five years or so. I also took an online graduate course in "educational design" when I was teaching secondary school. I am sure someone has done research, but I think "best practices" is going to vary widely depending on the class and the students.

The best online courses I have taught have been ones that did not meet about 50% of the "best practices" on most of those links (and at my current school, which is unfortunately not one of those). However, I had students who were motivated to learn and willing to participate synchronously and asynchronously despite having busy lives and schedules.

When I have followed "best practices" at my current school, I end up doing a lot of extra work that students ignore or find confusing. For instance, one current best practice says that you should vary the ways you present information. "Students love videos!" "Students love infographics!" "Add pictures!" "Send out weekly emails with assignment reminders!" Most students do not (in my experience) watch videos, even when there are quizzes on them. Most students (in my LMS) get confused by pictures because they think they are supposed to do something with them. Most of my students do not read weekly emails, even when they have missed class and could use them to get caught up.

Similarly, "Best practices" says videos should be under 5 minutes long. More than half the videos I produced for my 200+ students this academic year have fewer than 10 views. More than half of my 10 most popular videos (20-90 views each) are over ten minutes long. My observations of the numbers of views and durations of views on my own videos suggests to me that students don't like my talking head even for two or three minutes but will actually watch most of much longer videos when I show how to do something on the screen. (I also suggest that students start and stop the longer videos and try to follow my steps in their own work, which I guess is like having lots of little videos, but it doesn't make sense to me to create those breaks and make them hunt for the next steps).

AR.

[downer]

Dismalist

I can prove that best practices exist!

Let B be defined as best practices.

B either exists just in the mind or in the world.

Practices that exist in reality are better than practices that exist only in the mind.

So if B exists only in the mind, we are led to a contradiction. B would not be best practices.

Therefore B exists in the world.

[the_geneticist]

I'm taking an online class about "best practices" in online teaching and I don't think they have considered that their materials are internally inconsistent.
Last week, we were told to think about making a syllabus that's more like a comic book or post a video or make a "liquid syllabus".
This week, we are learning about how to make our course more accessible and checking for ADA compliance.
A video of your syllabus or a comic book of your syllabus makes your course LESS ACCESSIBLE.

The LMS has lots of features to let students know "what's new and due", so many in fact, that students just shut off all of the notifications & reminders.  I've played around with the idea of having the course materials "unlock" for students when they complete tasks, but it's not worth the trouble & confusion.

I for one, hope to never have to teach an online course again, but I'm too early career for that to be likely.

[downer]

I really like teaching online most of the time. And I think with the right student population and a good approach, it works well.  What I don't like is having to deal with adminstrative bullshit and busywork.

[dismalist]

This is truly a coincidence: The first time I heard the term "best practices" was precisely during an indoctrination session about on-line teaching!

Maybe the disease -- of saying such nonsense -- has not spread too far beyond on-line teaching. Perhaps it is used intensively in other endeavors.

[marshwiggle]

Downer, I know this comment belongs in another thread, but what in hell is "best practices" supposed to mean?

Does anyone sincerely believe that we use worst practices?

That we use merely adequate practices? [I'm for this one.]

I usually just take it to mean "something that has some evidence of its effectiveness" as opposed to "what I've always done, which I copied from the profs who taught me...."

So, something chosen rather than done by default.

[Hegemony]

We have a week-long course that people who teach online have to go through, to be approved to teach online. After that, they have to submit their course proposals to another committee to be approved.

The course-approval committee requires some things that the online-instruction strongly course recommends against. Like hour-long talking heads videos.

The committee will not give way, and insists those videos are crucial. (And insists that students love them! What universe are they living in?)

What people have ended up doing is making a couple sample hour-long talking heads videos for the course approval committee to approve, and then never actually using them in the course.

Is this a big waste of instructors' time? You bet. That's what our university specializes in — wasting our time.

[ciao_yall]

Ugh.

Reminds me of the time I wrote an online class with group projects. The Online Class Guru asked how I would make sure to pair "stronger" students with "weaker" students. 

I said I had no idea, I let students choose their groups based on interest. Besides, how could I know in the first 3 weeks who would be "strong" or "weak?"

He threatened to pull my class unless I grouped students according to "best practice."

I ignored him.

He approved it anyway.

[the_geneticist]

Ugh.

Reminds me of the time I wrote an online class with group projects. The Online Class Guru asked how I would make sure to pair "stronger" students with "weaker" students. 

I said I had no idea, I let students choose their groups based on interest. Besides, how could I know in the first 3 weeks who would be "strong" or "weak?"

He threatened to pull my class unless I grouped students according to "best practice."

I ignored him.

He approved it anyway.

Ugh!  Why would pairing the "strong" students with "weak" students be considered best practice?  Unless you mean that "strong" means someone with more familiarity or expertise and "weak" meaning a novice?  In my experience, the students we would call "weak" (in the sense that they are chronically late, absent, disorganized, disengaged, academically underprepared, etc.) generally want to work together anyway. 
Just like the whole "Don't have a group with just one woman!  Don't have a group with just one transfer student!  Don't have a group with just one [fill in the blank]!"  I may or may not know those things about my students and I don't necessarily want to ask them to disclose.

[spork]

The Harvard page is about best practices period -- nothing there applies only to online instruction. The Stanford page is pretty much the same. The video embedded in the Wabash page is also similar, but very simplistic.

The Stanford page has this sentence: "A major drawback with course designs that have content as a priority is that it often focuses attention on what the faculty member is doing, thinking, and talking about and not on the interaction and engagement of students with the core concepts and skills of a course." My university decided that the pandemic-caused shift to "online instruction" meant "replicate what faculty do in the physical classroom (lecture) in an online environment." The end result was a lot of live stream talking head video. Not a best practice, whether one's course is online or face to face.

[dismalist]

Let me fix that:

"A major drawback with course designs that have content ... is that it often focuses attention on what the faculty member is doing, thinking, and talking about and not on the interaction and engagement of students with the core concepts and skills of a course."

[mamselle]

I worked for one lab PI who was a kind of local examiner (in pharma) and was very attuned to the phrase "best practicies."

It made sense for labs where decisions about how much to stock, or what procedures get what amount of training, or what level of PPE was needed for which reagent interactions had to be made on a regular basis, sometimes not by the same person for the same lab (say, if someone was off sick, or on vacation, and their assistant or another PI was covering, there was a decision tree-like plan to work from--and which, as the EA, I sometimes had to point people towards...).

In some other settings, a triaged decision-making-structure also makes sense: "If this person has a bleeding head wound and that one has a sprained ankle, treat the head wound first..".

But in other settings, while it could well apply, and might even be beneficial, it also seems a bit like second-hand usage of the term, almost as if someone overheard it in a hallway conversation between two STEAM folks and thought, "What a useful phrase! How can I turn that into a workshop with a brochure and a PowerPoint package and a three-day seminar attached..."

But people never do that.

No.

M.

 

[Hegemony]

As a "stronger student" in high school, I got deliberately paired with "weaker students" all the time. I hated it.  I guess the idea is that I would patiently serve as a tutor to the weaker student. Which I had no desire to do. What it meant was that I would try to convince the weaker student to care, and the weaker student would roll their eyes and go back to talking about sex or drugs, and then I would have to do all the work. Basically I hate group anything anyway, but this is one big reason why.